Days after taking the 2023 Oscars stage together as presenters, Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield are circling their first movie together—a romance, Deadline reports.
Sources told the outlet that Pugh and Garfield are in negotiations to lead StudioCanal’s We Live in Time, which is being described as “a funny, deeply moving, and immersive love story.” John Crowley, who earned BAFTA awards for 2015’s Brooklyn and 2007’s Boy A (also starring Garfield), is set to direct, with Nick Payne (The Last Letter From Your Lover, The Crown) is writing the screenplay.
The first glimpse of Garfield and Pugh’s rapport was on display when they jointly presented screenwriting honors at Sunday’s Academy Awards to the Daniels for the original screenplay of Everything Everywhere All at Once and to Sarah Polley for the adapted screenplay of Women Talking.
Although they’ve never formally worked together, the two A-listers have orbited around each other in recent years. They’re both recent Oscar nominees—Garfield for both 2016’s Hacksaw Ridge and 2021’s Tick, Tick…Boom!; Pugh for 2019’s Little Women. They’ve each done tours in comic book franchises—Garfield as Spider-Man/Peter Parker, and Pugh as Yelena Belova, a role she’ll reprise in the upcoming Thunderbolts. And they were back-to-back Vanity Fair Hollywood cover stars too.
In her interview for this year’s issue, Pugh spoke about the pleasures of working with fellow stars in her age bracket, including Dune 2 actors Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, and Austin Butler: “For me to be able to work with the ‘young Hollywood’ of the moment, and them being beautiful people, and then have them on my phone when I want to text them—to see that that’s the direction in which our industry is going is such a wonderful feeling.”
It comes as a bit of a surprise that Pugh is dabbling in the romance genre, as just recently she downplayed any chance of starring in an all-out romantic comedy. While promoting her current film A Good Person, directed by ex Zach Braff, she said during a Q&A that her tendency to gravitate toward “very intense roles” could prevent her from taking on the genre. “I think it would have been strange if [Braff] wrote a Nancy Meyers thing for me, to be like, ‘So…you’re not going to cry in this movie.’ I’d be like, ‘Oh God!’” she said. Then again, there’s no way of knowing just what Pugh and Garfield’s “immersive love story” will entail; maybe there will be tears.
No release date for the project has been provided, but if all goes to plan, Pugh and Garfield will begin filming later this year.
This post was originally published in Vanity Fair.
